


glass cannon

by rakukajas



Category: Castlevania, Castlevania (Cartoon), Castlevania (TV), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: Domestic, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship, M/M, OT3 near the end, Serious Injuries, TLC, Trevor thinks he's dying, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Wolf-Alucard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-13
Updated: 2018-11-13
Packaged: 2019-08-23 00:23:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16608284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rakukajas/pseuds/rakukajas
Summary: There’s acrack,and then something like a rattling sound in his skull, and it’s been barely three seconds when Trevor finds that his mind has gone neatly and blindingly blank.There’s a ringing sound, too – a strong, bleeding thing, not unlike running your finger on the edge of a champagne flute – and he blinks the world back into focus, the ground sloped on its side and biting into his cheek as he spits the gravel from his mouth.Ah, he thinks.I’m bleeding from there too.





	glass cannon

**Author's Note:**

> trevor has a bad time.
> 
> warnings for: graphic description of stab wounds, hypothermia, and unexpected wolf hugs.

There’s a _crack,_ and then something like a rattling sound in his skull, and it’s been barely three seconds when Trevor finds that his mind has gone neatly and blindingly blank.

There’s a ringing sound, too – a strong, bleeding thing, not unlike running your finger on the edge of a champagne flute – and he blinks the world back into focus, the ground sloped on its side and biting into his cheek as he spits the gravel from his mouth. _Ah_ , he thinks. _I’m bleeding from there too_.

There’s a moment where the pounding in his brain slows, and then dulls, and then stops, only for the sound to be replaced with footsteps, crunching through dirt and grime until they step feather-like in front of his eyes, obscuring his vision even further. One leg kneels – there’s a voice, he believes, coming through thick warbles – and then – _shit_ , okay, he’s being brought up to rest against a barrel. Of something. The place where his head momentarily meets the surface is a white-hot shock that jolts him even further, and he very _damningly_ can’t see, and he’s numbly holding his arms out for leverage on another pair of worried, searching, decidedly _handsy_ little things, and the way that they’re stroking his face is quite lovely, and he’s finding that he doesn’t want it to stop.

The light of a nearby lamp hits a pair of liquid-gold eyes just so, and when the realization hits, Trevor somehow manages to laugh blood into Alucard’s face.

It’s more of a pained bark than anything, and hurts somewhere low in his stomach, which is concerning – and Alucard recoils, swearing, stumbling backwards onto his hands, and Trevor laughs even harder, and if he wasn’t probably concussed, this would be _hilarious_.

“Was that necessary, Trevor?” Alucard groans, scrubbing at the glob of red splattered across his otherwise pristine cheeks. He sits there, muttering for a bit longer, and the moment drags on for long enough to allow some catching up to take place. Trevor peers around where Alucard’s squatted in front of him and takes in the polished wood floors, walls -- tavern, perhaps? – but they’re just on the outside, for some reason. For some blasted, stupid, _freezing_ reason, Trevor growls inwardly, just now registering the nip of cold against his nose and how much it burns the back of his skull. Bits of fine brown glass have been scattered to his right, ending where a half-shattered bottle is steadily being buried by snow. There’s an energy hanging low in the air, slowly sizzling to a mist, and Trevor knows it from the buzzing in his teeth to be the aftermath of an attack from his whip. Demons about, surely.

Alucard swipes across his face with one clean glove, the strands of his silken hair more frayed and wounded up than any normal situation would allow. Watching him for facial ticks then alerts Trevor to the fact that he’s--concerned? Afraid? That he’s outside a tavern and injured; there’s only a few possible explanations for that. In their journey to travel towards the Belmont estate, they’d passed by a diminutive little town, and staying in it meant convincing Alucard to commit to a pub crawl. He moves his foot and winces at the _clink_ when it scrapes glass. It’s the rest of a fine bottle.

Ah, fuck. 

Trevor swallows thickly and forces himself not to lean his head back against the barrel, because this is one of those moments where he’s very hesitantly, very warily disappointed in himself. If he’d somehow gotten himself into a bar fight in the middle of their trek—well. He’d understand Alucard’s disappointment, too. Something clearly went wrong here, and it’s probably his fault, and he’s beginning to wish he was still as drunk as he _believes_ he was about fifteen minutes ago, when this all apparently went to shit.

He sits up effortfully, and looks straight ahead. Works his throat into making a sound, destroyed as it is. “Alucard,” he says, and it falls on silence.

Wow. Something must’ve _really_ went wrong. Alucard ignores it, having recovered from the blood-spit, and returns to crouching over him, hands roaming over his face and his eyes and his chest in a clinical sort of way, muttering little hissed things to himself in a feeble attempt to keep calm. Then, Trevor’s eyelids are pulled open carefully, stared into for the express purpose of pupil-checking, the distance between their faces shortened and distorting his vision. Breath fans gently, hotly, over his cheeks, warming the frost in his nose. He hadn’t expected the dhampir’s breath to be _hot_ , of all things; then he moves back down, ignoring the way Trevor is clearly trying to muster words, to press at a new and surprising wound beneath his ribs. 

At the sudden flare, Trevor chokes, once in pain and then once while trying to form a sentence. The sound he makes in struggling away from it is almost animalistic, his hands coming up instinctively to counter it, but Alucard shushes him and forces him back against the barrel with the hard line of his forearm. Everything is a bit too white, too loud, blood rushing in his ears in beat with the throbbing in his skull and the sticking pressure on his stomach. The feeling of numbness—of dull, unidentifiable pain pricking deep beneath his skin where he can’t even _see_ is positively nauseating. Breathing hard through his nose like a bull, it takes a moment for him to still, but he clears his throat and tries speaking again.

“Alucard, come _on._ ”

Alucard looks up as if startled – and the way he glares, suddenly, brightly, _furiously,_ delivers more hostility than Trevor was expecting. Than he hoped, really. He should be learning to expect this by now. 

“ _What_ , Belmont,” he says, blandly, in the cool tone Trevor knows well, fixing his eyes and his hands to the wound. “What.”

“I--,” Trevor sighs. “... What happened?” 

Alucard purses his lips and scrubs at his eyes, seemingly at a loss for words. The ringing in Trevor’s ears has dissipated by now, but there’s a sharp panging in his skull at the base of his neck that spiderwebs all the way to his eyes, almost forcing him to squint.

“I’ve known you for long enough to know you meant well by it—,” he begins, and Trevor’s hopes rise. “—but I really wish you hadn’t.”

“Hadn’t meant well?”

“No. Hadn’t _done_ it,” Alucard clarifies, and Trevor wants to strangle him.

“Hadn’t done _what_ , for God’s sake?” he wheezes, tweaking Alucard’s hand where it rests on him. “I don’t know if you realize this, but you and I are on opposite sides of the last twenty minutes, and I’m still trying to figure out where the hell we _are_ , nevermind what I _did_ , you—!”

“You assaulted someone.” The words jar him out of his dribbling anger. Alucard’s striking eyes whip back to meet his gaze, narrowing serpentinely. “A civilian. In a town we’ve only barely set foot in, in a region Sypha and I have agreed we’d rather not make ourselves very intimate with.” 

Fear pools low in his gut, but Alucard’s words blow over him with ease, surging forward into his space like he’s being scolded and spat at. “Word travels fast, Belmont. I believe I’m allowed to express my disapproval at your adolescent outbursts when we’re trying to, as you know, save the _planet_.” 

Trevor is quiet for a long time, too wrung-out and exhausted to feign innocence. He’s got enough right mind to protest the bastard’s accusations, but he’s not sure how much of it is true, and he’s not entirely comfortable finding out. “Well, did he…” he starts, voice rough and wet. “Y’know... Have it coming?”

Alucard makes a twisted face, fangs flaring out of his mouth. “Oh, I’d _love_ to know how on Earth that’s relevant to this, but—”

“No, I just— wanted to _know_ —”

“No, _you_ just need to hold still and let me—,” Alucard says, when he is then interrupted by a strong hand around his trembling wrist.

Trevor jostles it, pleading, forcing eye contact back up towards him. Waits a beat, panting. 

“Alucard. I know you’re doing something very important.” There’s a snort of pained laughter at that, which is good. “But I need you to explain to me what the _fuck_ is going on. Because I’m… My brain is. Yeah. Not working at its greatest capacity.”

A low, “When is it ever.”

“And I’m _finding_ ,” he urges,“it quite hard to understand anything you’re saying to me. How did it happen.”

Alucard gives him a long, hard look, like a governess from his childhood after catching him with half his arm in the cookie jar. It nearly matches in capacity to make him shrivel with discomfort.

“Hey, now.” Trevor gives his hand a little squeeze, smearing blood over the trembling pair of them. He employs the mewling little voice he uses to make Sypha laugh; it has the same effect on Alucard, evidently. “Be kind to me, I’m very hurt.”

Alucard exhales, sending a stream of hot air into his face that flutter into his eyes. The muscles in his jaw work as he clenches and unclenches to the time of angry, angry little dhampir thoughts. “You fought a man. Him, over there.” He nods in the direction of a slumped shape on the ground Trevor hadn’t even noticed. The effort it takes to crane his neck goes unsaid, but when his eyes pinpoint the man’s crumpled little body, he’s relieved to find the slow rise and fall of a very alive chest.

“For good reason, I suppose,” he continues. Trevor has a moment of private victory, a little swell of pride in knowing it wasn’t entirely criminal. “He was…” Alucard trails off, hesitating. Trevor knows this as the ramping momentum behind something embarrassing, and his eyes widen, waiting, giving a silent grinning _Go on_. 

And then, ah, “... pickpocketing me.”

Trevor snorts, _loudly_ , hysterically, and there’s a sudden pain in his side and regrets laughing immediately, because now Alucard takes it upon himself to apply pressure to that exact quarter-inch of fresh agony, and with a yelp, the moment has soured quite a bit. 

Recovering with fast gulps of cold air, Trevor eventually gasps himself back into coherence. “He was _what?_ ”

“Pick. Pocketing. Me.” The tension is his jaw is fucking _visible_ , Trevor notes with internal satisfaction, would be weeping with laughter if he could even move. “And you were already drunk, and instead of taking anything worth stealing he’d reached into the wrong pocket and took my journal, of all godly things, and starts down the alleyway. You played hero. And missed. Because of course you did.” 

There’s a dark humor to his tone, a layered coating of bitter fondness and exasperation. One fine brow rises in amusement. “By the time I rounded the corner, he’d already pulled a knife on you. I got him a bit after that.”

In the aftermath of his laughter, Trevor allows the words to ring and process, breathing shallow and fast and painstakingly measured. His heart is _thud-thud_ ing right at the corners of his throat, where the frost burns deeper into his lungs, and he coughs, hot and dry, the spasming in his stomach whiting out his vision, forcing his teeth to click together in pain. He waits until the waters recede to breathe again, and replies with a soft, “Ah.”

“Yes. Ah.”

“And that’s why I have… this?” He hesitates, but finally peers down the front of his tunic. There greets the sight of blood beaded over Alucard’s hands, where they rest heavy on his wound. It makes him exhilarated and sick all at once.

“Er… yes.” Alucard’s tone is an attempt at clinical, but comes out almost sad. “It’s potentially hit your vitals. The ‘potentially’ is where I hope you've spun some gratitude: he was aiming for the heart.” Trevor gives a toothy grin at that. “But our dear Sypha is tapped of resources, and the snow is… unpredictable. We agreed that I'd watch over you until she returns with a nurse from further down.”

“Why not just… carry me?” Trevor asks between a grunt, trying to reposition himself against the barrel and failing. “Aren’t you big and strong?”

“And risk exacerbating your wounds further?” Alucard sighs, eyes closing as if to pray for patience. “Or expose your bleeding body to the unforgiving elements? Smart plan, Belmont. It’s a miracle we have you around to think of them.”

_“Shhhht_ \--Shut up. Dick.” Trevor grouses, and Alucard is already so over this conversation. 

He heaves a sigh and shuffles forward, against the gravel, further into Trevor’s space. It’s a tight squeeze for the two of them, but the closeness allows for an ease in applying pressure without straining his shoulders. The blocks around them whistle with vacancy, their inhabitants having swarmed indoors to shield against the oncoming weather. They’d decided to stay at the town if only to have a moment to experience a side of warmth and hospitality before continuing their trek into the vast unknown. Boost morale, and all. None of them had expected the storm, or the cutpurse peasantry, or the cold shoulder from the rest of... everything, really. He wonders if Alucard ever got his journal back, briefly, until he’s distracted by the blood on his hands and how it’s started to cool. He doesn’t know where to wipe them, and he doesn’t know where to go from here.

“How long until Sypha... comes back?” Trevor asks, mumbling, vision falling in and out of focus. His head is beginning to bob slightly, as he thinks of it as filled with water, and goldfish, and sand and sunlight and blood, and jostled into forming a very small, very hard-to-think-through whirlpool. Things are spinning out of focus too brightly, much too quickly, and nausea pools high in his stomach with a swirling kick. 

“Shouldn’t be longer than--oh.” Trevor is halfway to the ground when Alucard catches him by the shoulders, bloodied hands and all, and plants him back firmly into a seated position. Only, of course, to then remove one hand and apply it back to his wound, firmly, down. It earns another hiss of pain, but instead of _feeling_ pain, he feels a sharp pull towards fog and nothing, like dunking your head underwater. Or he might be blacking out. One of the two.

He licks his lips, and one of them has split, slightly. It takes effort not to prod against the copper taste. “As you were… saying?” he rasps.

Alucard squeezes his shoulder, hard, and Trevor imagines that a part of his soul sinks back into his body. “I _said_ it shouldn’t be longer than another few minutes. If anything, Sypha is trying to convince the nurses that you’re not a threat. Only a few. You can do it. You’ve done worse without my help.” There’s a thread of fear in his voice, and Trevor wonders what might happen if he does die here. Tonight, before Dracula, before anything. Maybe the two of them will stumble around in the countryside until they find another Belmont, tucked away somewhere in the ashes of his manor. It’s where they’re headed, after all. Or, he thinks, maybe they’ll just go on without him. The prophecy undone, the world damned and blotted out, all because of some fuss with a thief and a knife in the dark.

As if sensing his shiver of anxiety, Alucard presses his mouth to the crown of Trevor’s head, and sighs through gritted, chattering teeth. 

“Yeah,” Trevor sighs back, “Sure have.” And the roaring gets louder. Red blooms at the corners of his vision. The snow has, curiously, stopped nipping cold at his fingertips. Something warm and blossoming and dangerous has pooled low in his gut, and Trevor has enough sense to know it’s a bad sign.

Moments pass, long and whistling. Between blinks, Alucard has somehow removed his coat and splayed it over Trevor’s shivering shoulders, leaving himself in just his terribly low V-neck, now stained and splattered with blood near the hems.

“Stick with me, Trevor.” There’s a timbre of panic to his voice now, but the rasp near his head is both a comfort and a thrill as it vibrates through his teeth. Alucard’s neck has taken up nearly half his sight, and he smooths a broad, heavy hand across his chest, as if the pressure will keep him rooted in consciousness. “You’ll be fine. Like I said. You’ve—,” a voice crack, there, “survived worse.” 

The passage of time seems like nothing, yet Trevor knows it’s been far too long for Sypha and the nurse. He’s beginning to feel numb in the face. Alucard snaps his fingers in front of his eyes and it jolts him awake, upright, when he wasn’t even aware of his slumping in the first place. “This is no time to sleep, Trevor. Keep those eyes open. Don’t tell me you’re going to let a bar fight be the terrible thing to end the Belmont line.”

“Maybe to spite you,” he wheezes. When his sight greets blackness, he briefly thinks he’s fallen unconscious, until the momentum of breathing pries his eyelids back up again and a slant of light meets his swollen eyes. 

“Just breathe,” says Alucard, smoothing his snow-frosted hair to his scalp, avoiding where it sticks warm with blood. His sharpened calm is all it takes for Trevor not to scream. “All you have to do is breathe.”

The stretches of silence grow longer, tenser. The night and the snow brings an excruciating quiet, a lifelessness to the world, a ringing of danger in the ear—but he’s so _warm_. He’s burning up, now, the inches of space between his side and the rest of Alucard’s body flaring with heat, and their little cove is rapidly becoming safe and comfortable enough to take a full rest in.

He breathes slow, and soft, and distracts himself with thoughts of pleasant things; the slight tang of tea, the richness of mead. Thoughts of horses and hunting. Of firewood and venison. Ignores the biting in his back, the bile against his teeth, and the torrential force of enduring agony riding just beneath Alucard’s hand, like a split in his being. He hates thinking about it. He hate hate _hates_ thinking about it, and now he’s thinking about it and groans with pitiful nausea and it sounds nothing like Trevor Belmont and everything like the reedy, wounded boy, age of ten, weeping and picking through coal and sticking ash for a sister, for the glint of a rosarie. He’s been hurt before, he knows— has been lashed and bitten and broken and trampled, effectively brought to the end of his rope countless times, but somehow, nothing like this. He doesn’t know how that cutpurse did it, but he’s sure that the knife made it near-all the way through—probably a dagger, the way things are these days. And to make matters worse, he took it out, the bastard. Took it out and now there’s a hole where everything’s falling in on itself, bleeding horrible and dark out into the street. 

The fact that he can’t _see_ where it hurts, where it pierced and tore and ripped irreparably into his body, makes it so much worse, _so_ much worse than anything he’s had, and with renewed agony he’s sweating, grabbing at everything he can. Alucard, at the sound of his cry, pulls himself tighter around Trevor, but in the process applies a half-pound more pressure onto the rip than before, and Trevor nearly screams.

He roars and chokes and hits Alucard’s arm with a helpless beg along the lines of _stop that_ , _please_ , before he can compose himself, and Alucard says, “I know, I know,” in a croak so low and sad it nearly makes Trevor regret feeling pain in the first place. 

The world whites out and comes back again. With Alucard’s face buried in his hair, it’s impossible to make out his expression, but the shape the words come out in--muffled, clicking at the corners, arced around a frown--give him some sort of unpleasant clue.

With an agonized, impatient sob, Trevor heaves his full weight into the soft fabric of Alucard’s chest and lets it rest there. He’s about ready for shock to kick in when the voice above him croons, breath rippling the part in his hair.

“Trevor.”

“Mmm?” He lifts his head from Alucard’s front and comes away with tear streaks.

“I’m sorry.”

Trevor snorts. “... F’r what?”

“This is my… fault.” His voice comes out strangled. “I was careless. I acted as though I alone am responsible for the safety of the human race, and yet I neglected to protect the human who shares that burden with me. I apologize.”

“That’s… melodramatic,” says Trevor, barely a whisper into his shirt. “Dunno if you noticed, but I’m over here bleeding out. You don’t get to feel sorry for yourself.”

There’s a beat of complete understanding, and Alucard’s chest shakes with laughter against Trevor’s cheek. “Alright,” he says. “I’ll stay quiet.”

“Good. Been tryin’ take a nap, here, you keep fucking waking me.”

Then there’s a buzz in the air; the atmosphere changes. And a noise, in the distance--like clattering around labored breath--approaches with snow-heavy footfalls, lamplight, shouting. Alucard shifts away from him to see the source, and the sudden lack of heat is a nipping shock against his raw face, his pounding skull; he moves, lifts, stands, but the motions are too quick, and there’s no more support to keep Trevor upright--he’s _so_ much more tired than he remembered--and just as a sharp “ _Over here!_ ” calls above his head, Trevor’s body slams soft and motionless against the snow.

 

 

He’s being moved by cold, strong hands, and sees white again.

 

 

Trevor wakes, slowly, blinking his crusted eyes hard against daylight. There’s a window opposite him--opposite his cot, _bed_ , oh--he reaches blindly for his covers and pulls them up to greet his own bare chest, wrapped under layers of gauze and binding. The moment stills. The room is wonderfully warm and appears to a nearby inn of sorts, snow falling light outside the window, and he looks around for any sign of—

“Good morning.” 

Trevor turns, and Alucard is smiling at him, adjusting his wild snarl of golden hair back up into the vague wrap of a bun. He thuds his book shut and sits up in his chair by Trevor’s bed, attentive and smug, eyebrows in the vicinity of his hairline. There’s a warm shape by his leg, and he startles before realizing it’s the bright curl of Sypha’s hair, where she’s nestled up by his blankets and only just stirring, blinking her sweet blue eyes at the world until they fall on him with pleasant surprise.

“Ah, Trevor!” she smiles, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Her hair still looks slightly damp from the snow, curls springing as she bobs her head up at him.

Trevor is—many things, right now, and breathless is one of them. Most of them. “You’re—”

“Here?”

“Yes! And I’m—”

“Alive?”

“Yes!” He sits up in excitement and winces, hand meeting where his wound is wrapped and bound. Alucard holds his hands up, pressing him back to the inclined bed.

“Hold on,” he chuckles, “You’re still healing. You’ve been here since last night.”

“Last... night, I’m sorry? You mean—?”

“This morning, I suppose,” Alucard corrects himself. “It’s only been a few hours.”

“We got you some help,” Sypha says, and his attention slides over to her. “I was capable of sealing the wound with the aid of a passing Speaker band. I only took long because I was trying to get their attention.” She looks sheepish, suddenly, mouth twisted in a pout. “They did more help to you than any rural nurse ever could. If you’d like, you can speak with them once you’re released.”

Trevor hums, fingers tapping rhythmically against his bandages, impatient, prickled. “Alright.” He knows he should be happy to be alive, but instead, he’s anxious. The sick pit in his stomach rolls up and down with each movement, like its own little wound, rocking back and forth in his skull behind his eyes. He must’ve started staring into space, because Alucard once again snaps his fingers in front of his face and jolts him back into reality.

“Trevor,” he says, much more softly than need be. “... If you’re not alright, you’ll tell us?”

“Yes, I’m-- yeah,” Trevor says back, a bit too quickly. “Just a little… rattled. Is all.”

Alucard nods with that _look_ of complete, scrutinizing disbelief, and Trevor begins to feel very small and nauseous of all things. He dog-ears a page and sets his book down on the bedside table.

Clasping his hands together, Alucard leans forward and smiles, one side of his mouth crinkling up farther than the other to reveal a coy fang. “What do you need?”

“What?” he parrots, mouth agape. Sypha blinks owlishly, just as confused.

“I can hear your heartbeat, Trevor. If you’re unsettled, I can leave the room for you—-” Alucard makes as though he’s standing up, and—-

“No, that’s not. Necessary,” Trevor interrupts, before he can help himself.

Alucard makes a show of sitting back down with purpose, meeting his eye with a rising half-smile. “As I said. You’re not going to rest without easing your tensions. What can we do?”

Trevor pauses open-mouthed and thinks on it for a bit, making a show of examining his fingernails. There _is_ one thing.

“You won’t laugh.”

“Why would I?” Alucard says at the same time Sypha says, “No promises.”

Trevor takes this as the go-ahead.

“When you, ah. Held my shoulder last night.” It feels weird talking about this in front of Sypha. She glances between the two of them like she’s solving her own little puzzle. “It felt a bit like your… er, wolf body, y’know? When it’s curled ‘round, I mean. Like when you used to do it in the woods, to keep us from the cold.” He’s looking towards the window to refrain from making eye contact, hoping the request somehow slips its way through.

“Mmhmm,” Alucard says, already standing and stretching. Bless him. There’s a moment where he sets his knee on the cot, the weight shifting its balance completely, when he hooks one arm around around the line of Trevor’s shoulders and _leans_ forward. If he were any other person they might have collided catastrophically, but instead, Alucard’s weight glitters and vanishes. In his place, a stark-white monster the size of a wild boar easily lands its paws on the other side of the cot without even touching the blanket, dropping soundlessly on the hardwood and slowly turning to the two of them. 

Sypha coos with delight as the wolf leaps up with a half-hearted scrabble on the cot behind Trevor’s head, curling around like he’s not too ridiculously large for the damn thing. She giggles and urges Trevor to sit up, back against Alucard’s sandy fur, and clambers onto the cot herself. It’s a miracle it doesn’t bow and collapse beneath them. It might have something to do with the weight properties of dhampir forms, or something, and Trevor makes a note to ask him about it later. It’s nothing the Belmonts have ever taught him, that’s for certain.

Right beside Trevor’s head, Alucard _boof_ sconversationally.

Just like that, the roiling weight in his gut vanishes too. Maybe it’s that he’s too used to having a heavy fur cloak around his shoulders, but the pressure is doing marvelous things for his nerves, and he’s not so embarrassed to ask him to stop. Alucard is weird. Alucard is understanding. Of all the people Trevor’s ever met, he’s also been the only one to be able to turn _into_ things, so that’s a plus.

His friend licks at the air beside his ear like an untrained animal and Trevor barks out a laugh, nearly batting his head away from the tickle. Sypha cackles, which only encourages the behavior, and he bats at her too. “Shh, stop! Alright, alright. What, do you want me to read the fucking book for you?”

_How quaint. I’d appreciate it_. Alucard’s voice rings clear and artificial in his mind, a side-effect of dhampir shapeshifting. The wolf simply _looks_ at him, with those huge glossy-gold eyes, and Trevor feels his willpower wavering. 

“... Fine. Got nothing better to do, I guess.” 

Sypha reaches over with a smile and hands him the book; he opens it to the dog-eared page, pleased to find it’s a novelized series and not some goddamn encyclopedia. 

It only takes a few moments of out-loud page reading for the wolf around his shoulders to curl in tighter, as if sensing unresolved tension. 

_Relax, Trevor._ It puffs out a horrible breath beneath his chin, scrubbing the top of its head against his beard. _You’re going to hurt yourself like that._

“He’s right, you know,” Sypha provides, lifting up her Speaker robe to cross her legs on the cot. “I can see it from here. I know Belmonts are suppose to be ever-vigilant, but really, this is a bit much.”

“You’re one to talk,” he muses, scratching under its neck. “You two have never-not been high-strung about something a day in your lives.”

“Okay, but that’s like, our _thing_ ,” Sypha says, nervous laughter bubbling up in her voice. “Our thing. Definitely not yours.” A pause. “Do you need to… talk about something?”

Trevor sighs, and squeezes his eyes shut. Tries not to think about the bloodied hand on his body, the warmth of their corner in the alley. 

“No.”

_Nothing?_

The breath against his face, the heat of their closeness. The fear, the protection, the crowding. It made him feel small. Wanted. Important. Even— _fragile,_ maybe,ugh. So unlike anything else he’d ever experienced, anything ever expected of him. The pain was its own realm of horror, but the feeling burns at something low in his stomach, makes him shudder, makes him _want_ —

_Nothing at all?_

Trevor thinks, for one moment, that he could tell them, maybe—and then the feeling is locked up and compartmentalized with dedicated, frantic swiftness, as if he could never have even brought it to consideration in the first place. Banished. Gone. 

“Trevor?”

“No.”

 

The moment sits. The room has gone cold.

Trevor opens his eyes, and he’s shivering.

**Author's Note:**

> this, like many other things i've written, started as an OC drabble and somehow ended up here. let me know if these kids are out of character or anything like that; i wanted to explore trevor's fragility (as opposed to his Everything Else) when he allows himself to get hit for once. medieval injuries suck, dude!
> 
> (i also like to believe that alucard eventually starts turning into a wolf to warm them up on cold nights while traveling. put those big boy paws to good use.)
> 
> yell at me on tumblr @rakukajas! ♡


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